Musings, rants, and anecdotes from the Emerald City

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At our increasingly semi regular meeting, I floated the idea of taking over my beautiful friend Grant’s tinder profile for a month if he let me buy his beer. He refused, which is obviously bullshit, but it got me to thinking; why? Why wouldn’t he want one of his best friends who only wants his never ending happiness to manage his love life? No one knows what’s better for him than Sean(who would obviously help) and myself, so why would he refuse?

It’s pretty obvious, let me count the ways:

Grant is afraid of being happy

He doesn’t want to find forever love in this lifetime

He’s rightly suspicious he’ll die of a sex overdose

My commitments conservatively, on what he’ll get out of this:

3 first dates in this month

2 second dates

The greatest trust fall experience he’ll ever have

So what does the world get out of this?

I’ll blog every interaction of this experiment. The world will watch Grant meet the dozens of women of his dreams by way of the clever wit and prose provided by his partners in blogging and he will of course have a beautiful life experience that he can write about, of course from the bed of his new soulmate that he’ll meet probably just hours after letting us use his account.

Now I don’t think he’ll be super interested in this, so i started this petition on change.org. Let’s just assume he can’t say no if we get 100 signatures. Hell, I think 10 would be more than enough.

I went for drinks with my brilliant startup programmer friend the other week. It’s something I do from time to time and it makes me feel full of life (nothing like my dreary writers group!) and we talk about great things and we drink too much. Despite making his life as a programmer, his background is in physics and while discussing the current state of our union, he mentioned that it’s just the universe increasing in entropy.

Now I also loved physics as a high school and college student and while I didn’t major in it, I certainly got my fill as an engineer and I too know that the saying is ‘the entropy of a system always increases.’ I was mistaken however when I repeated my understanding of it(as I think many understand it) as the disorder in a system increasing (which also made sense given our current political atmosphere).

He corrected me by describing entropy as the release of energy, or restated it as a system will always find a lower energy state.

Now we were pretty drunk at this point but I tried to hold fast to my ‘but isn’t that still chaos?’ idea.

No. You might experience chaos personally as it sputters and dies, but it, or its individual parts, are releasing energy and are then finding a lower energy state by not working anymore.

Ok, ok, so how is our current political system not going towards chaos?

It’s just a lower energy state. People don’t have to understand anything anymore, so they don’t. Less trying, less effort, less energy. They just latch onto a narrative. People stop voting, or they vote with the least amount of information possible, despite more being available. It would take more energy for everyone to engage and to get good people in place to fix the things. The low energy path is putting in more of the same, or encouraging the same system down its current path, until it inevitably breaks, you put an ego maniac in place whose proud of not reading and your pistons finally seizing and the car stops.

And then chaos! Right?

Well maybe, what is the next path to the next lower energy state? Is it riot and revolution and rebuilding, or is it a shuffling of the cards where only good people get through the door because that’s an easier system? I don’t know. I wish I could project but things only really happen if the system makes it easy and we’ve built a system for corruption. What does it look like when that system chokes itself out?

Enter the lake wobegon or dunning kruger effect: Dumb people tend to think everyone else is dumb and we’ve made it ok to be dumb, or at least validated the dumb persons idea that dumb is just as good as smart (a lower energy state, surely) when it comes to discourse. How is this increasingly relevant idea going to play out? Intellectual civil war? Books vs guns?

I wish I was Robert Reich here and could logically identify the historical trends that are about to reemerge but I can’t. I can say thought that you should go have beers with your friends. You’ll talk about some crazy things for awhile and you’ll feel better about the world because there’s someone out there who likes talking about the same things as you and you can reinforce all of your cognitive biases because that’s the easiest path.

With each exhibition, we will post interviews with the participating artists along with a photo of said artists in their studios and images of their work. In the future, we will post videos of artist interviews.

My first instinct was to stick a figure into the paintings, as that is my usual subject matter, however I don’t often paint still life’s, so I thought I’d take this as an opportunity to do so. The cup I used is ceramic and reflective. I wanted to use that quality and…

Creativity doesn’t always come easy. It doesn’t come from a place of merely wanting to write. That doesn’t make it be. It doesn’t always come out the meeting of four well-intentioned guys, hoping to sip from the fount of profundity, hoping to dip digital pens in it and spread it across a blog somewhere in the vast internet. That fount doesn’t beckon to any random call. It wanders about the ether invisibly, alighting upon the unwitting at random, only some of which take advantage of that sudden inspiration instead of vegging out on reruns of Friends on Netflix, or finishing Firefly because it is supposed to be good.

Sometimes camaraderie is worth the trip, even if the goal was to concurrently write something of worth and weight. The goal isn’t always the thing that matters. The goal is a point of direction. The trip to that goal is something more worthy of the time spent, even if that goal is never reached or that goal morphs into something altogether different. Sometimes you get four guys together to write about Seattle music, but you end up eating amazing food, drinking great beer, and having unvetted and directionless conversation while looking out over Ballard to the mountains backed with the oozing yolk of the sun.

This blog doesn’t have to define itself just yet (maybe never). It merely has to be a sounding board. It needs no true goal yet. The trip will define it, if we let it. Its goal may turn out to be rather mundane and unglamorous. That does not say anything of the path that led it there. Write to write. Write when the fount has alighted upon your head. When no-one is watching, you’ve no reason to explain how anything you write fits inside the blog’s raison d’être. We’ve got all the time in the world to cordon things off into themes. Right now, it’s better to just write about something.

So, this is a call to arms (typing fingers?) for my fellow bloggers. Don’t over-analyze it. Write. About whatever. In the meantime, we can revel in the incidental camaraderie of our well-intentioned meetings. And drink beer.

Want to meet some new people? Want to find an outlet for yourself in 2015? Well good.

We need more writers! We could also use an editor!

Why the need? We are some working class dudes and although we love this website and getting together to work on it, we few, we four, can really fall behind or really lose track of time.

Why do we do this? Because in a world driven by commerce and logic and science, we all need some creation and some art in our lives. We all have a thing for writers and writing and we come together to ‘get it out’. Continue reading →

It’s November, and therefore it is National Novel Writing Month, which is a reason for the sudden dearth of activity on this scrappy little blog of low and variable attendance. NaNoWriMo, as it is called amongst those that choose to attempt it (being people of many words that somehow prefer brevity when referring to the activity itself), on its surface is a month wherein the participants put on their discipline pants and try to write a novelesque thing that measures in at 50,000 words or more. This usually takes the form of genre fiction, as the Great American Novel has a tendency of complexity which one can’t really afford while speeding through an average of 1,667 words a day. One would assume that most of these special humans are also working during this month, and eating, and sleeping. This is truly a heroic effort by those involved and with little real reward besides self-satisfaction and pride.

Everyone is inside writing a novel

Anyway, back to us. Grant and Stephen are both doing some form of this challenge. I’ve decided that I could reasonably expect a poem a day from myself, a feat which pales in comparison to the definitive goal. I feel fine about my decision and have kept pace quite easily (though the quality is not always up to snuff). I’ve already completed the true goal two years in a row and was rather excited to sleep and eat and socialize this particular November. We’ve continued to meet up (mostly), and I’ve even accomplished spilling a good amount of beer all over the laptop I am now using (enter montage of prying up and cleaning all the keys on the laptop then reconstructing from photos). We’ve postponed challenges in order to focus on fulfilling our goals and critiquing each other’s work. And drinking beers. Plenty of beers.